The first beta of PC-BSD 1.4 has been released. "After months of hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the 1.4 BETA release. This version includes many exciting new features and software, such as 3D desktop support via Beryl, KDE 3.5.7, FreeBSD 6.2, Xorg 7.2, new GUI tools & utilities, and much more." Get it from the download page.

One big difference between FreeBSD and any Linux distribution is that the base is completely standardized. This eliminates many of the dependency issues that you see with different linux distributions. The ports system takes care of it, and the packaging of the ports do handle all the dependencies correctly.

While there's a crying need for autopackage in the Linux work, the uniformity of the FreeBSD deployed base makes it unnecessary there.